Rug cleaning
in San Pablo.

San Pablo’s history starts at Alvarado, where Jesús María Castro built the Alvarado Adobe in 1842 for his mother on the Rancho San Pablo land grant; the original stood until 1954, and a replica now sits at the civic center as California Historical Landmark No. 512. Almost nothing else in the city is that old. San Pablo’s population went from about 2,000 to 25,000 in a few wartime years as workers took jobs at the Richmond shipyards, and the city incorporated in 1948 to manage the boomtown that resulted — small houses on small lots, put up as fast as lumber allowed. In Rollingwood, most of that housing dates to between 1940 and 1969, and the wool rugs we collect there tend to be older pieces laid straight onto original subfloors, in homes that have had one or two owners in eighty years. Around City Center and El Portal, where shopping centers replaced wartime housing tracts in the 1950s, turnover runs higher and the rugs skew newer and more often synthetic. Whatever decade the house was built, we run the same twelve-step cold-water immersion wash at our Newark workshop, with the same crew handling pickup, cleaning and return.

Your pickup window is arranged in advance and confirmed by phone or text, with customer service answering from 8am to 8pm, seven days a week. San Pablo runs about thirty-eight miles from our Newark atelier by way of I-880 and I-80, forty-five to sixty minutes off-peak — the longest of the drives in this stretch of Contra Costa, so we treat it as a planned visit rather than a passing stop. Our own team does the collecting, washing and returning.